Jade Roberts examines the legality of the United Arab Emirates’ 2008 arrangement with the Comoros to provide Comorian passports to the UAE’s stateless bidun population. The article also considers a similar arrangement contemplated by Kuwait in 2014 and compares both cases with bilateral responses to asylum seeking and irregular migration.
Roberts argues that the comparison shows bilateral agreements in both contexts to be indicative of a growing deterritorialisation and commodification of protection. The analysis therefore considers responses to statelessness through the question of how protection is transferred between states.
The legality of the bilateral United Arab Emirates–Comoros arrangement supplying passports to the United Arab Emirates’ stateless bidun population
The article treats bilateral arrangements on statelessness not merely as mechanisms for providing passports, but as arrangements that shape how protection is allocated between states. That framing brings the legality of such arrangements and the transfer of protection responsibilities into the same analysis, while offering a comparative point of reference for debates on nationality law and the prevention of statelessness in Türkiye.
International Journal of Refugee Law · 2026
DOI 10.1093/ijrl/eeag028